Off the Hook: Escaping Toxic Ideology

By Earl Wayne Heflinger

The author uses his own personal storyof being born into a Christian fundamentalist family with extreme beliefsto paint a vivid picture of what life is like in toxic ideologies such as fundamentalist religion.

The book has three parts. The first describes the spiritual abuse of his childhood due to stifling rules and restrictions inflicted by his parents, caught up in their churchs teachings, on his thought processes and behavior. The remarkably poignant stories show in painful detail how his self-esteem was crushed, how he was never intended to think for himself, and how he was made to feel different and totally out of place in the worldall by loving but misguided parents. During his school days, his social life was severely stunted because he felt like an outsider everywhere but in church.

The second part discusses his lifelong struggle with spiritual healing and his transition from a spoon-fed belief system to a personally chosen worldview. He thoughtfully muses about all the significant elements of religious/spiritual belief systemsGod, Jesus, the Bible, sin, morality, science, life after death, marriage, divorce, and othersand contrasts his evolving beliefs with those of organized religion. This is presented to give the reader a comprehensive illustration of how one particular seeker has constructed a personalized belief system through continual rethinking and updated understanding.

The third part calls on the authors advanced education and professional experience in business and government in analyzing and developing systems and procedures. It describeswith a wealth of tips and checkliststhe process by which he escaped a toxic ideology and came to feel intellectually free and off the hook. It ends with heartfelt encouragement for anyone similarly affected by repression to accept all available helpful resources and muster the determination to claim their personal power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504399920

Earl Wayne Heflinger

Earl Wayne Heflinger, M.S., M.A., is a semi-retired information technology professional, an experienced wedding minister, an accomplished artist in acrylics, and a philosopher by nature. He and his wife Linda are both ministers, credentialed by the Universal Life Church, since 1991. They have performed more than 2,500 weddings, commitment ceremonies, vow renewal ceremonies, property blessings, and memorial services. Their ceremonies, which are self-developedinfluenced by sources from a variety of spiritual disciplines and their own life experiencesare meaningful and spiritual, but not specifically religious. They own and operate The White Rose Chapel in Colorado Springs. Earl is a father and grandfather. He and Linda collectively have five grown children and ten grandchildren. They live, along with their two dogs and several foster parrots, in Colorado.

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Copyright © 2018 Earl Wayne Heflinger.

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Scriptures Taken from the King James Version of the Bible

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-9991-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9993-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9992-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018902889

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/12/2018

This book is dedicated to my family. I include not just my biological family but also my family by marriage—the family of my dear wife, Linda. Our collective brood includes her two sons and two daughters and their families, as well as my own son and his family.

Linda deserves a specific focus of this dedication. Without her unconditional love and support I wouldn’t be the man I am today, nor would I be as far along on my spiritual path. She is the true love of my life. Or, as we like to say, the love of my lives, since we believe we have been together many times over the eons. It feels like we have been together since dirt.

Our grandchildren—currently Linda and I collectively have ten—also deserve a specific focus, because they are our future. I wish all of them the most constructive opportunities and experiences as they forge their own life paths.

My family includes a diversity of viewpoints, and I expect this book, which lays out my life process in some detail, to evoke a range of reactions. My intent in this dedication is to honor that diversity and make it clear that I respect everyone’s individual life choices. That includes my late parents, whose religion I broke away from. Who I am is attributable to everything in my life from my conception onward (and, I believe, before that), including their influence.

Richard Bach, author of Illusions and other wonderful books, has said, The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.¹ In that sense, this book is dedicated to everyone who identifies with the intent expressed here. Whether I consciously know you or not, if you are part of my family in this broader sense, consider this book dedicated to you.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

— Galileo Galilei

Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

— Pope John Paul II

I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

— Abraham Lincoln

It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion.

— Albert Einstein

Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.

— Neale Donald Walsch, The New Revelations

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

— Albert Einstein

[Fundamentalists] don’t think they’re better than you; they think God thinks they’re better than you.

— John Fugelsang

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.

— Jon Meacham

Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.

— Oprah Winfrey

THE WARRIOR’S PATH

In Tibetan Buddhism’s Four Dignities of the Warrior’s Path, courage and ferocity are absent. In fact, the qualities regarded as essential for being a warrior have nothing in common with the training regimens of Marines or football players or lobbyists.

The first dignity is often translated in English as meekness, but that word doesn’t convey its full meaning. Relaxed confidence is a more precise formulation—a humble feeling of being at home in one’s body.

Perkiness, or irrepressible joy, is the second dignity. To develop it, a warrior cultivates the habit of seeing the best in everything and works diligently to avoid the self-indulgence of cynicism.

The third is outrageousness. The warrior who embodies this dignity loves to experiment, is not addicted to strategies that have been successful in the past, and has a passionate objectivity that’s free of the irrelevant emotions of hope and fear.

The fourth dignity is inscrutability, or a skill at evading the pigeonholes and simplistic definitions that might limit the warrior’s inventiveness while fighting for his or her moral vision.

— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia

A NOTE ABOUT BIBLICAL REFERENCES

All of the quotations from the Bible included in this book that I have provided personally—that is, excluding any that may be embedded in quotations from other authors—are from the King James Version.

The King James, or Authorized, Version was first published in 1611, and thus it obviously uses an archaic form of the English language that sounds very outdated today. There are a number of newer versions of the Bible which have attempted to make its message sound more relevant to today’s audience. But I have chosen to use this version exclusively in my quotation of the Scriptures because it was the version preferred by my family and the churches I attended as a child.

I am not attempting to use biblical quotations to support my current way of thinking. I am using them to refer to the way things were in my family when I was young. Therefore, I am not trying to make them sound relevant to today’s audience.

In fact, in general, I am using biblical quotations only to illustrate what I don’t believe anymore.

CONTENTS

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Introduction

Part 1:   A Toxic Ideology

Prologue:   The Hook

1:     Gripped by Fear

2:     A Gradual Squelching

3:     Recognizing the Insanity

4:     Spiritual Abuse

5:     The House Rules

6:     Marriage (Part 1)

7:     What We Believe

8:     Your ID, Please

9:     One Way

Part 2:   A Personal Belief System

Prologue:   Victory Lap

10:   Free to be Me

11:   No Hell Below Us

12:   Spirituality

13:   The Light

14:   God

15:   The Bible

16:   Jesus (the Christ)

17:   Christianity

18:   Evolution

19:   Human Consciousness

20:   Life After Death

21:   Sin and Salvation—and Animals

22:   Morality

23:   Marriage (Part 2)

24:   Miscellanea

Part 3:   Getting from there to Here

Prologue:   The Turning Point

25:   Escaping the Unacceptable

26:   Re-Examining Familiar Concepts

27:   A General Transitional Process

28:   A Philosophy of Life

29:   Science and Scientism

30:   A Third Perspective

31:   Metaphysical Conclusions

32:   Taking a Stand

33:   An Unlikely Calling

34:   Marriage (Part 3)

35:   Coming Full Circle

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

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Belief systems are reflected in our memories, language, emotions, thinking, and behavior. Belief systems are formed early in life by how others treat us, how we see people treat each other, and how others respond to our needs as we grow. They are formed by our surroundings, what we discover intellectually, by our experiences, hopes and expectations. Our belief systems permeate all that we do, how we interact with others, how we handle our feelings and how we give and receive love. Our belief systems are the sum of our assumptions, judgments, myths, and behavior patterns. Our belief systems contain all our family messages about our personal value and worth. They determine how we plan and make decisions, how we interpret other people’s actions, how we make meaning out of any experience we have, how we solve problems, how we form relationships, how we develop our careers, and how we establish our priorities. Our belief systems form the filter through which we conduct the business of our lives.

— Alice Vieira, Belief Systems and Your Personal Power

Humans, throughout history, have wrestled with questions about the essentially unprovable aspects of our existence: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens after we die? In ancient times, before religion and science were the distinctly separate disciplines they are now, the great philosophers contributed significantly to the body of human knowledge and understanding with writings on these subjects that are still quoted today. More recently, organized religions and modern science both seek to answer these same questions in different ways.

We come into the world with brains that have to learn about the world around us more or less from scratch. We tend to do that, initially, by observation and by learning from the facts and opinions presented by the people around us. The term tabula rasa—meaning blank slate—is a name for the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception.¹

Most of us are born into a family or group that holds a particular system of thought or belief, and what we learn about the world, from the very start, is largely dependent on the most influential of the people in our environment. Humans are capable of believing an incredibly wide variety of versions of supposed reality, and an incredibly wide variety of justifications for clinging to those beliefs and rejecting others. Witness the large number of religions in the world and the strife and warring between peoples of different worldviews.

By the time we are adults, and well before, most of us are immersed in a system of thought or belief that has attempted to answer for us those existential questions. Many organized religions claim to know where we came from, why we are here, and what happens after we die. Modern science also has provided theories which answer these same questions to the satisfaction of the scientifically-oriented and which in many ways contradict the religious views.

But the answers to some of these existential questions are, nevertheless, unprovable. Religion’s answers are based on faith, and science’s theories can’t prove, with irrefutable evidence, what, if anything, happens outside the realm of the experience of living humans. The questions of our origins and purpose are interesting and worthy of debate and intense investigation, but none of the existential questions has, in my opinion, the importance of the question about existence after death.

For those who believe that individual consciousness ends with the death of the brain, this question is moot. But the question of what happens after death is incredibly important to people who have been taught—as I was—that they will be tortured forever in hell if they follow the wrong religious beliefs.

According to Pew Research, about half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives.² People make these changes for reasons as varied as individuals’ psychological needs. Some of these reasons have more to do with the thought or belief system the individual is drawn to, rather than a belief system they are fleeing from. For example, people raised with no particular religious indoctrination sometimes embrace a particular religion or embrace atheism; I have examples of both in my own family. As fascinated as I am with the processes people go through in making such transitions, people who change worldviews because of being attracted to another one, rather than a need to escape a repressive one, are generally not particularly interested in analyzing or dwelling on their process. They have found what fulfills them and they are often content to examine the reasons for their shift in worldviews no further.

But for me, and many others, the reason for needing to change beliefs is much more compelling. I had to get away from the belief system I was born into. I began to realize as I matured that what I was being taught as a child was overwhelmingly not what my intuition, conscience and native judgment were telling me was true. I had to find my own life path.

I was born into a very strict fundamentalist Christian home. I was taught from birth that being saved from eternal damnation by faith in Jesus Christ was more important than anything else in life, and that such salvation granted eternal life. And so, in my case, this issue about life after death could not possibly be avoided. I struggled with it for decades.

My religious indoctrination was not just coming from church on Sundays. The rules in my house about how to live applied all the time, and were said to be coming directly from God—a God so demanding that what I could not say and what I could not do identified me, I was told, with a minority of the population. My family believed that only a very small percentage of humans were saved and would go to heaven. I was made to think of myself as an outsider among humanity at large. I was to be set apart from, and not associate myself with, virtually everybody else in the world except those believers in our independent church and those like it.

Fundamentalist Christians talk a lot about love—God is love—and joy in the Lord and hope in Christ. But the path my family set me on didn’t give me the opportunity to experience love, joy or hope in any way that my native instincts might have determined. I was to ignore what my conscience and innate judgment might have inspired me to do, and live strictly according to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

I was taught that the point of living in the world was serving God, and that my reward would be in heaven. In other words, I was not to be tempted to get caught up in worldly affairs, and the good life would be after I died, in Heaven—where, of course, there wouldn’t be anyone except those who believed as we did.

The realization that something was wrong with the religious beliefs I was being taught started with the discrepancies I found between scientific discoveries and Bible teachings—the latter being considered literally true by fundamentalists. The more I learned in school about science, the more I started to realize that I had to question many of those beliefs—that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, for example. My analytical mind rebelled at some of the religious doctrines, which were meant to be taken on faith, but which didn’t seem to stand up to scientific evidence or even logic.

But it doesn’t take long to realize that deciding to rethink the fundamentalist belief system isn’t a matter of what’s logical. It’s a matter of faith. And, whether fundamentalists acknowledge it or not, it’s fear that keeps the faithful faithful.

Fear-based religion can make people feel trapped; they have been taught that thinking in any other way will result in dire punishment. Some people, myself included, come to regard their fear-based religion as a prison which is keeping them from being happy and free to live life according to what feels right in their own hearts and minds. And there are other reasons besides fear of hell that can make people can feel trapped in a belief system or lifestyle, including ethnic or family pressure to conform, or fear of shunning or ostracism.

Any ideology that teaches fear or devalues individual worth is one that I would call toxic—and one that deserves to be challenged. Anyone with the courage to leave such a restrictive system and build a positive life path of their own choosing has my utmost blessing and all the encouragement I am able to provide.

I had to get away from organized religion to begin to see myself as OK—not born as a sinner and hopelessly lost, as I was taught. I needed to be able to see myself as worthy of charting my own life path as my native abilities allow and my conscience dictates.

And that is what I have done, as you will see from my life story. I have left a fear-based religious environment that severely wounded my sense of self-worth, and I work daily at healing the psychological damage. I have created my own personal brand of spirituality.

Spirituality is seen by some as almost synonymous with religion, but I generally use the term as one of contrast—spirituality as opposed to organized religion, although they are certainly not mutually exclusive. To me, spirituality in the most general sense refers to the concern for, the valuing of, and the practicing of the highest qualities of life we as humans can experience. And for me personally, it also refers to a deeply held sense that there is more to reality than the material world.

I am happy, and I feel free.

Beliefs about marriage are one important aspect of my story, because they have had a profound impact on my life. The beliefs about marriage imposed on me in my formative years contributed to my naïveté about certain aspects of life—including, especially, a stunted understanding of the factors most important to successful relationships. My first two marriages ended in divorce.

Fortunately, I never gave up on the ideal of marriage. I came to understand that divorce is not necessarily a failure, but, regarded constructively, is a powerful learning opportunity. If we can identify the elements of a relationship we don’t want to repeat again, we have added more specifications to the description of what we want in the ideal mate, and who we ourselves want to be, the next time. I had done that work. I knew I was a better person, and I had literally made a list of attributes my ideal wife should have. By the time I found Linda, my third wife—who is my soulmate and true spiritual life partner—I had finally come to know about marriage what I wish I had known thirty years sooner.

Except, of course, that, if I had, I probably would never have met her. I really believe that things happen perfectly, in divine order. My first marriage produced my son, as it was supposed to. And, honestly, I wouldn’t trade any of the experiences I had along the way for all the money in the world.

Perhaps I needed the life lessons I’ve had not only for my own spiritual growth and expansion, but also as a platform for helping others. And eventually I found one; or, more accurately, it fell in my lap.

I am now a veteran wedding minister, having performed more than 2,500 weddings and vow renewal ceremonies. Credentialed by the Universal Life Church, I have had the opportunity to develop a wedding ceremony script that is purely spiritual and totally unaffiliated with any organized religion, and the privilege of discussing spiritual partnership with thousands of couples, and—considering family, friends and guests—speaking about what makes a good marriage to thousands and thousands of people.

I did not do it alone, though. My wife Linda is also a huge part of the development and practice of this ministry. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

The evolution of my understanding of marriage—from a repressive religious definition to a freer, spiritual definition—is one aspect of the transition of my belief system, a transition that I will describe in detail. It has been a lifelong process that has resulted in redefining my values, my belief system, and my philosophy of life.

This book’s overall premise is that it is possible to free oneself from any toxic ideology—fear-based religion, beliefs that devalue individual worth, or any situation that restricts personal freedom—and to find happiness in a freely-chosen life path.

Namasté!

Earl Wayne Heflinger

PART 1

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A TOXIC IDEOLOGY

But, no matter what you believe, the Earth is not 6,000 years old. So if you have a religion that insists the Earth is 6,000 years old, I would encourage you to rethink that.

— Bill Nye¹

PROLOGUE

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THE HOOK

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

— Jesus (Matthew 4:19)

The belief that the Bible, as God’s Word, commands Christians to actively work at seeking converts is a central tenet of Christian evangelicalism.

I remember that in the 1950s my father participated with a local Fishers of Men ministry group, and I was curious enough recently to search online for current manifestations of that movement. I found several Fishers of Men ministry websites as I was writing this, including fomministries.org, www.fishersofmen.org, and www.fishersofmen.net. The website of that last one, as I write this, prominently displays a graphic representation of a fishhook, complete with the barb that prevents a fish from freeing itself once it has been impaled.

Having been born into Christian fundamentalism, I accepted, as a child, that persuading nonbelievers to join the religious belief system was a good thing, because that was what I was being taught. Once I realized I was having problems with those beliefs, I began to see how difficult leaving the faith was going to be. But it took me many years, looking back, to realize how hooked I really was.

Christian theology includes the concept of the age of accountability—the time in a child’s development when he or she is mature enough to be held accountable to God for his or her sins and be responsible for accepting salvation through the grace of Christ. Adults accept a religion, or convert to a different religion, for reasons of their own; but I was scared into being saved at age eight, before I had a chance to make a rational decision about it. Christianity, like most religions, however, doesn’t intend to give children the opportunity to make mature decisions about its doctrines. Parents who are believers are instructed that they should teach their children about God’s way—as interpreted by that particular religion—from birth. And that’s what my parents did. I was on the hook long before I knew that I should have had a choice in the matter.

I fully realize that in the mindset of believers, the Christian gospel is freeing; but the feeling of freedom is always relative to the feeling it’s being contrasted with. A person imprisoned for, say, committing an infraction of a foreign government’s laws or customs feels free upon being released; but that person was arguably even freer before the infraction was committed—free to make the choice to either get into the situation or to have avoided it in the first place. The gospel is freeing only if one has first accepted the idea that God is going to punish him or her otherwise.

To me, freedom—getting off the hook—took a long time, because I had been taught very carefully from birth that I was not supposed to think for myself; I was supposed to find and follow God’s plan for my life. I was not supposed to consider myself as having any worth on my own; I was a born sinner who could only be saved through the grace of Jesus. Like the children’s song Jesus Loves Me says, We are weak but He is strong. The song represents just one way out of many, in an institutionalized system, of devaluing self worth.

When I finally felt off the hook, years later, I was free to observe religion as it looked through my own eyes, not someone else’s. I was free to decide for myself how to spend Sundays. I was free to drink a beer if I chose to. I was free to use the same words that the people around me used if I hit my finger with a hammer, not having to fear that certain words incur God’s wrath. I was free to let my own personal conscience and judgment be my guide. A sense of personal freedom to that degree, which some people take for granted, for me came through some very hard work—that of rethinking virtually everything I had been taught about what is important in life.

I believe that anyone who finds him- or herself in a belief system of someone else’s choosing—or someone else’s lifelong acceptance—can get free and construct a personal worldview by a process similar to mine.

But the process I’m describing starts with the realization that even well-meaning parents and community members sometimes teach children things—presumably believing they are true—which nevertheless devalue their feelings of self worth. In my case the things I was taught created feelings of fear, insecurity, distrust of my own intuition and personal judgment, and distrust of humanity in general.

Such negative feelings about oneself make it really difficult to rise to one’s full potential.

My heart sings when I hear parents, teachers, or any other authority figures tell children that their lives matter; that they are worthwhile human beings; that they can be anything they choose if they apply themselves; that they are trusted to make good decisions about their lives; that it’s OK to make mistakes because trying, failing, and learning a better way from that failure is better than not trying. Encouraging words like that matter to me because I did not get them when I was growing up. I knew I was loved, and I was encouraged to get a good education, and I think my parents wanted me to be happy, but the approval of my personhood always felt conditional. I was not expected to decide for myself how to live my life. I was expected to stay on the hook.

There are all sorts of toxic situations that people are born into, but fundamentalist religion is as good an example as any I know about.

My best way of illustrating how someone can feel disempowered by a well-meaning family is to tell my own story.

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GRIPPED BY FEAR

…[T]he Lord said unto me, Gather me the people together, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children.

— Deuteronomy 4:10

My eight-year-old heart was beating wildly. I felt trapped. It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kind of feeling. What I was about to do was probably the scariest thing I had ever considered doing. But—and this is the part that was really weighing on my mind—not going ahead and doing it was an even scarier proposition. I was terrified.

I knew that once I moved a muscle, every eye in the place would be on me, and there’d be no turning back.

By now I had become thoroughly aware of the emotional attachment to my impending decision that my parents had and, to some extent, so did the entire congregation. The organ music and the preacher’s invitation all were part of the same message; a message that had already been imprinted on my young brain and that saturated my consciousness: Jesus wants you to accept him as your savior now, before it’s too late, so that you will go to heaven and avoid eternity in hell.

Most people think of heaven and hell as final destinations, according to religious teaching, one of which each soul will experience after death.

At this point you may be wondering, What created such a terrifying sense of urgency? Why would a young child be so afraid of death that the fear of hell could have such an emotional impact?

Believe me, it wasn’t the fear of death, or of hell after death, that was on my mind. No healthy eight-year-old thinks he is going to die anytime soon. No, this was something else. Something my parents told me was definitely going to happen and could happen soon. This was way worse than the normal kid fears: bogeyman, monsters under the bed, that sort of stuff. Nothing I could think of then, or can think of now, could have been scarier to a child.

The Doctrines of Salvation and the Rapture

You see, a few weeks earlier, my four-year-old sister had decided she wanted to be saved, and had gone forward during a church service. For those not raised in evangelical Christianity, I probably need to explain some concepts here. Christians generally believe that Jesus was the Son of God and that he died on the cross to save us—we who were all born as lost sinners—from our sins.

Evangelicalism is a form of Protestant (non-Catholic) Christianity which emphasizes personal conversion—being born again—by means of merely accepting Jesus into one’s heart as his or her personal Savior. Evangelicals also believe in the importance of sharing the good news of the Biblical story of salvation through Jesus Christ.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. The dictionary definition of fundamentalism is an attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles. Christian fundamentalism is a variety of evangelicalism that believes that the Bible is the literally-true Word of God. In our home, these teachings were taken very seriously. People use the